When personal is interpersonal: Organizing interaction with deictically open personal constructions in Finnish everyday conversations

We investigate the role of two Finnish deictically open personal constructions, zero person and open second person singular, in the organization of everyday face-to-face interaction. Combining corpus-linguistic methods with approaches derived from interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, we explore the distribution of the zero person and open second person singular in conversational data and analyze their interactional contribution in local contexts of use. The focus is on two conversations in which the absolute frequency of the focus constructions is high. In these conversations, zero person and open second person singular are distributed relatively unevenly; yet the two constructions often occur in similar contexts, as well as within the same sequences. Despite certain similarities, zero person and open second person singular have different interactional functions: zero person is typically used to share a personal experience to which the speaker has primary access, or to discuss a topic at a very general level, while the open second person singular portrays the experience or state of affairs being talked about as mutually accessible. We conclude that both zero person and open second person singular are employed to negotiate the referential framework, and thus to manage interpersonal relationships in turns-at-talk.